The United States military is increasing its use of unmanned vehicles across all service branches and in all environments. Examples of currently planned uses of unmanned vehicles in the marine environment are for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) missions, mine and submarine detection, maritime interdiction missions and harbor security. The scope of military missions for unmanned vehicles is currently planned to increase significantly and will encompass a wider range of missions and uses.
The commercial market also is increasing its use of unmanned vehicles. Examples include search and rescue, drug interdiction, remote launch and recovery of external payloads, autonomous environmental testing, oil spill collection and monitoring, weather monitoring, and real time tsunami data collection and monitoring.
An advantage of unmanned vehicles is the ability to cover large areas of operation with a significantly reduced number of people than would be required to perform the same task in a manned environment. Another advantage is the ability to deploy unmanned systems into environments that are hostile or dangerous to people.
In the marine environment, most current unmanned vehicle designs are based on retrofits of manned vehicle designs, and incur operational and performance envelope limitations built into vehicles designed for carrying people, such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 7,789,723 to Dane et. al. Alternatively, systems designed specifically as unmanned vehicles, such as described in U.S. Pat. No. 6,807,921 to Huntsman, typically have been designed for particular characteristics, such as, for example, endurance or underwater performance, but have not been designed for a broad range of characteristics.
A need exists for a combination of multi-mode operational characteristics and integrated systems to provide for a controllable autonomous network of unmanned maritime vehicles capable of covering large areas of diverse environments, whether in the air, on land, on the surface of the water, or underwater. A need also exists to advance the state of the art of unmanned vehicles by enabling fewer people to execute more complex missions over larger operational areas.
This background information is provided to reveal information believed by the applicant to be of possible relevance to the present invention. No admission is necessarily intended, nor should be construed, that any of the preceding information constitutes prior art against the present invention.